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How many social networking sites do you use?

Daily I look at Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca, LinkedIn, Yammer, and probably a few more I use far less often. But what do you do when a friend or colleague invites you to use YASNS (yet another social networking site)?

I’ve been sitting on an invite to Namyz for ages. It was sent by a friend of mine, and I don’t want to snuff his enthusiasm for this particular site, but I don’t really want yet another of these to keep track of. Same goes with Plaxo. I’m sure they’re wonderful, but really, how many can one person be expected to use? What’s the etiquette for saying “no thanks to Namyz, but if you’d care to send me a LinkedIn invite, I’d accept that?”

5 thoughts on “How many social networking sites do you use?”

I think my answer is 1.5. Flickr halfway counts but I don’t use the social networking aspects. I have a linked in account, but I don’t ever use it to find information. Maybe recruiters use it, but I ignore their emails. It is some sort of bizarre online resume storage tool that everyone knows the URL for, or something…

Okay, a month late in replying to your post, but I finally had a minute to catch up. 🙂

Social networking is very important (as a reply to foo, specifically) in this day an age – cutting it off as “stupid” limits your reach and interaction with the vast majority of your peers and possible clients, vendors, partners, etc.

LinkedIn is a favorite for business networking – keeping tabs on friends and co-workers and industry openings and opportunities. Twitter has recently jumped into the forefront as an ambient awareness tool – a zeitgeist if you will for what the internet represents to the “wired” generations. Perhaps it is a little too addictive… Aside from calendars (like Upcoming/Google Calendar, etc.) where people post event information, the only other social networking tool I use is Plaxo — and that less for the social networking component as much as for the fact that it will synchronize my various calendars and address books without my having to actually hit the sync button somewhere. As an added bonus, if anyone in my network updates their information, it updates my address books automatically. Plaxo will also link to a bunch of other tools if you want it to (Flickr, Digg, Friendfeed, etc.) so you can follow them all in one spot, similar to the other tool Gordon mentioned.

Long story short (too late!), there are a LOT of social networking tools available these days. You have to find the ones that work for you, and then make them WORK for you! 😀